International
Report finds little evidence for the benefits of for-profit higher education outside the UK | A report published today by the Centre for Global Higher Education shows that the growth of the private higher education sector, especially the for-profits, has led to few improvements in the quality of provision.
4 ways to engage students early | No matter how your institution defines it, early engagement in educationally purposeful activities is the cornerstone of an effective practice.
Higher education needs new answers to its perennial funding crisis | Financial pressures are not going away. Do we need to acknowledge that for the higher education sector, rather like the NHS, a feeling of financial crisis is a normal part of life?
India’s education crisis of its own making | First, even if India were to succeed in its target of 30 per cent gross enrolment rate by 2020 in the tertiary sector, 100 million qualified students would still not have places at university and, thereby, would be forced to join programmes that they would not have otherwise opted for.
Queen says education reform should be national priority | Her Majesty Queen Rania on Wednesday called for turning education reform into a national priority and a long-standing popular demand by the Jordanian people, explaining that it is the foundation on which security, national identity, and a strong economy lie.
Science editor-in-chief sounds alarm over falling public trust | Berg, who started his career in chemistry but then moved on to span a host of other disciplines including biochemistry and personalised medicine, acknowledges that society’s confidence in science does “wax and wane” over time but thinks that, this time, things are different. In the US, “scientists have been labelled as another special interest group”, he says.
U.S. National
The real crisis in higher education is about a lot more than debt | Earning a college degree can be a pathway to higher wages and better employment opportunities, but for those who fail to graduate, those prospects quickly fade. And at a time when a majority of students finance their education with loans, dropping out of school comes with greater risks.
The Real Enemy of Education Reform: It’s the Colleges, Stupid | It’s not hard to figure out why colleges resist changes to the way we finance higher education: They do incredibly well under the status quo.
Report: Americans More Concerned About Wealth-based Achievement Gaps Than Racial Inequities | Americans are more concerned about—and more supportive of—proposals to close wealth-based achievement gaps among students than they are about Black-White or Hispanic-White gaps.
FACT SHEET: ED Launches Initiative for Low-Income Students to Access New Generation Of Higher Education Providers | Today, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is inviting eight selected partnerships between institutions of higher education and non-traditional providers to participate in the EQUIP (Educational Quality through Innovation Partnerships) experiment.
Experiment With New Education Providers Also Tests New Ways to Measure Quality | Four coding boot camps, three companies offering other alternative-education offerings, and the global conglomerate General Electric were chosen on Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education to participate in a new experiment that will allow eight colleges to offer Pell Grants and federal student loans to as many as 1,500 students in programs where unaccredited providers supply a majority of the education.
College gap fosters inequality | “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal,” the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission, said in a report that made headlines in 1968. A report today could say we are moving toward two unequal societies based on family income — one college-educated, one not.
The Problem With Public Colleges Going Tuition-Free | [T]uition-free public college could compound the increasing stratification of post-secondary education into a two-tier system that slots most low-income and minority students into the least selective institutions with the fewest resources and reserves admission to elite campuses mostly for kids from the upper middle-class and beyond.
America’s Higher-Education Agenda | With a didacticism appropriate to a lesson plan, Bowen and McPherson begin by reminding us of why we should care about getting higher-education policy right. Higher education itself is a “means of investing in human capital,” even “human improvement.” It equips people to “lead more productive and rewarding lives.”
U.S. States
Disputed dividends: Virginia’s wealthy universities balance endowments, expectations | As state legislators prepare to interrogate University of Virginia administrators over a new $2.2 billion investment fund, congressional committees already are scrutinizing the sizable endowments of two of the state’s top private universities.
Spending Your Tax Dollars | New research on public master’s universities finds that they are generally efficient, but economies of scale favor undergraduate over graduate education.
Where Does Your Freshman Class Come From? | On the subject of the migration of college freshmen, two things are clear: Most stay within their home state’s borders, and the rest tend to go to private colleges in neighboring states.
Free College? The U.S. Should Look at State Models That Are Already Working | [P]ublic colleges and universities could make attendance tuition free for students from low- and middle-income families, or roughly 80 percent of the population, if the federal government were to make the necessary investment in higher education that a policy of this magnitude would require.
Scholar: Rankings of High School Systems Follows Lines of Economic Disparity | As children across the country head back to school, WalletHub — a personal finance website — has released data comparing the quality of education in the 50 states and the District of Columbia in its annual report “States with the Best & Worst School Systems.”
Institutional
University of Northern Iowa corrects faculty salary inequities | After two years of discussions, the University of Northern Iowa faculty union and administration have reached a deal to rectify salary inequities that “unjustly held down the wages of dozens of faculty members.”
Prioritization Anxiety | How can a process more and more administrations are embracing be supported by professors? Or are they right that the process is really about eliminating programs that aren’t seen as rainmakers?
Diverse Conversations: Professoriate Still Lacking in Diversity | According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, only 16 percent of full-time professors at postsecondary institutions are minorities. That means that 84 percent of those in full-time professorships are White, 60 percent are men and 24 percent are women.
HBCUs Struggling to Find Stability at Top | As the new fiscal year began July 1 for most of the nation’s institutions, at least 10 HBCUs were looking for permanent chief executives, according to data collected by the Washington, D.C.-based Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF).
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